Chiral transition and mesonic excitations for quarks with thermal masses

Abstract

We study the effect of a thermal quark mass, m_T, on the chiral phase transition and mesonic excitations in the light quark sector at finite temperature in a simple chirally-symmetric model. We show that while nonzero m_T lowers the chiral condensate, the chiral transition remains of second order. It is argued that the mesonic excitations have large decay rate at energies below 2m_T, owing to the Landau damping of the quarks and the van Hove singularities of the collective modes.

5 pages, 6 figures, typos corrected

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• A way forward in the study of the symmetry energy: experiment, theory, and observation
• Quark propagator at finite temperature and finite momentum in quenched lattice QCD
• Chiral gap effect in curved space
• Spectral properties of quarks above T_c in quenched lattice QCD
• Recent progress constraining the nuclear equation of state from astrophysics and heavy ion reactions
• Spectrum of soft mode with thermal mass of quarks above critical temperature